Selling online can open up huge new markets for many businesses. When your store can be open 24/7 and you can reach a global market without the costs of mailings and call centers, it can be a huge boon to your business. But there are plenty of things to consider when designing an ecommerce site. It's not as simple as throwing up some shopping cart software and plopping products into a database.

There are tons of mistakes that online retailers make every day, all of them avoidable with a little careful planning. And even if you're already committing some of these mistakes, most of them are easy enough to fix. Avoiding them will greatly improve the experience of your customers.

Below are 15 of the most common mistakes that e-commerce sites make, as well as advice on how to avoid or fix them. Take the advice under consideration before embarking on a new e-commerce project or when thinking over your current ecommerce site, and make efforts to follow the recommendations outlined here.

E-Commerce websites are often thought of as typically being unattractive or poorly designed. In this post we will feature 35 appealing designs of online shops. Those featured in this post include examples from a variety of different industries and showcase several different styles of design.

Throughout this showcase the most noticeable trend of well-designed e-commerce sites is the use of high-quality photos. Many of the sites use large images on the homepage, and product and model photography is always important for creating interest from visitors.

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Shopping online can be a great experience. You don't have to leave the comfort of your home and you can quickly compare and read about all the competing products in order to pick the best one for you. But it can also be a little frustrating if the process isn't designed correctly.

Looking around for that checkout link, having to fill out registration forms and then being told the product is out of stock isn't going to make your day. Spend a little bit of time fine tuning your checkout process and polishing off the user experience and you'll be rewarded with happier customers and more sales. Here are 12 useful tips to help you do just that.

If you've managed to sell a product to a customer, use this opporunity to present further attractive offers to the customer. The topic "behavioral targeting", a technique that uses information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that customers. Many advertisers believe that this technique can dramatically help to boost the conversion rate.

Behavioral targeting is probably currently the most discussed advertising strategy. However, it is not clear if it possible to derive some meaningful customers' preferences and future behavior out of the earlier purchasing history. Wrong adjustments – based upon the browsing history – can significantly decrease the conversion rate as well.

In eCommerce usability improvements usually have a huge impact on conversion rates. However, usability doesn't only mean better visual guide or better site hierarchy. It also means a better communication with potential customers using a professional, trustworthy design, delivering the right information at the right time and communicating with users instead of throwing ad-slogans at them.

In this article you'll learn what to consider when preparing a perfect landing page for your product, how to focus user's attention on the most important parts of your sites and also how you can use videos and user ratings to improve your conversion rates.

Sometimes small changes can have huge effects. Concerning conversion rates, which is the proportion of website visitors who submit their contact information or make a purchase, better Web design leads directly to greater revenue.

Most online store designers who want to optimize their conversion rates only concentrate on the “inner” part of the shopping process, the sales funnel. They focus on product pages, the shopping cart and check-out-process. This is good, but not necessarily sufficient. It is equally important that advertisements convert – just as the simple fact that users find the URL and that both (ads and URLs) perfectly fit the image conveyed by the landing page. Sound practices make for the most successful conversions.

There are thousands of tips and tricks for increasing conversion rates. There are various marketing techniques that aim at simplyfing the purchasing and the checkout processes. This article is the first part of our new 3-part-series "Optimizing Conversion Rates" that covers most important strategies and techniques that will help you boost your conversion rate. The second part will be published next week, and the last part will be published the week after that. The first article deals with "proper" advertising, building up trust and credibility and the handling of shipping costs.

Last week we presented 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert – we discussed various rules and guidelines from marketing, such as subliminal suggestion, prevention of choice paralysis, AIDA-principle, attention guide and the Gutenberg rule. The main idea was to help designers and developers create a design that would help the site to grow and become a success the financial point of view.

This article presents further principles and rules that will help your site convert. Among other things, we cover A/B testing, footnotes, testimonials, feature lists, the sign-up process and typography. You may be interesting in the following related posts:

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